Graham Smith

Every day his responsibilities range from investigation and research, production, field recording, running the program, reporting, and photography.

Smith has worked all over the United States. Overseas Smith has worked in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he produced award-winning coverage of an IED attack and its aftermath in Kandahar.

After joining NPR in December 2002, Smith spent six years as supervising senior producer for NPR's All Things Considered. Before NPR, Smith was the senior producer and director on The Connection and Here and Now, programs produced by WBUR, an NPR Member Station in Boston.He served as director of the Christian Science Monitor's Monitor Radio from 1995-1997.

During the course of his career, Smith has received many accolades including the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism award and the Edward R Murrow Investigative Reporting award for his work with Youth Radio. Smith also received the Edward R. Murrow award for Hard News for his work in Afghanistan, the George Foster Peabody award for work with Youth Radio, and he was a Pew Gatekeeper Fellow.

Smith studied English and history at the University of New Hampshire.

Goats and Soda

12:02 pm

Wed November 26, 2014

On Lumley Beach, after day trippers have headed home, prostitutes look for customers along a 100-yard stretch of road near some of the nicer hotels as well as near the bars and restaurants along the beachfront.

When a man drives by the strip at Lumley Beach in downtown Freetown at night, he'll probably hear a sharp hiss. That's not an unusual sound in Sierra Leone. People hiss instead of whistling — to get your attention, to call for the bill at a restaurant, to buy a bottle of water on the street.

But the hissing along a stretch of beachfront road at Lumley Beach has a different purpose. It's the sound prostitutes make, and they've perfected the hiss. That's why they're called serpents.

Parallels

12:31 pm

Fri June 28, 2013

A U.S. soldier walks down a dirt road during the final U.S. patrol near the village of Arghandab, near Kandahar in southern Afghanistan. The area has long been a Taliban stronghold, and the Americans were turning the area over to the Afghan army.